Annotations

Hi all,
We have a request from our business users to include annotations or commentary to ReportNet reports. Apparently there are 3 ways of accomplishing this:
1. prompted, a prompt captures the remarks and after rerunning the report this data is displayed in the report.
2. designed, by adding the annotations that are needed in the ReportStudio design of the report (as text fields).
3. stored, by creating a jsp or similar program that is able to capture data, and store it in a database. When the report is run, it needs to pick up annotations from that database.

My question is two-fold:
- Are these the only options to include annotations in reports?
- Is there any software on the market/ open source that has already tackled this problem? (I was informed that datajungle has a product called annotator, that offers this functionality for Powerplay cubes).

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These are the only ones I know of. We are currently implementing this ourselves with a custom .NET app to add commentary to a database from a link in the report, and display relevant comments based on prompt values (also used as parameters to pass to the app). I don't know of anything on the market, but I understand Cognos have had a number of requests for this functionality and a number of users have implemented something similar for themselves.

url to your app should be of the usual form, ie http://server/directory/file.extension?param.... Etc
This works for us. Our application is on the same server as the ReportNet gateway. We haven't used the localhost construction, and aren't having any problems such as you describe.

Also, the string with the a ref should appear in the Report Expression property of the HTML item.

I've just noticed I had a double quote before the ? in the original expression (<a href=3D"URL OF APPLICATION"?APP_PARAM1=3D' ) - this shouldn't be there (ie should be <a href=3D"URL OF APPLICATION?APP_PARAM1=3D' etc).

Nope, didn't work for me. We're a client, not a partner, and my client login doesn't give me access to partnernetwork documents. I also can't find this document on the knowledgebase anywhere. Any other way to access it, or can you provide the text here if not too long?

If you want information to hover above the column titles, you can do so by unlocking the columns using the lock icon in the top toolbar, the inserting an HTML item over the column title. Here is the code for you.

<span onmouseover="this.style.cursor='help';hover_popup( 'This is where the annotation needs to be declared');" onmouseout="hover_clear()"><font color="silver" face="Verdana" size="2"><B>THIS IS WHERE THE COLUMN GOES</B></font></span>

i dont have any .net server or ASP server connected to my Cognos8
Server. Can i use the above code to acchive the below
functionality.

I would like to keep a button/hyperlink to add comments at the
bottom of the charts/reportnet reports. when we click the button
we need to get the prompt to enter the comments on the chart.
once we enter it has to be displayed on to the chart or
reportnet report.

I developed a technique to add comments to the face of the report
and have the comments stored in a database so that you can
display either the most recent on or all of the comments ever
made. This was done as a proof of concept so it would need to
be productionalized, but it worked quite nicely.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how to post files to this reply, so if
anyone is interested in receiving the information, please
contact directly with a message to me on this site. I believe
you can use the IT Toolbox to ask me a question directly via an
e-mail.

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